“There’s so much construction around us, people don’t even know we’re open,” said co-owner Masaye Waugh, who said Bootleg will close on Oct. 31. “The last couple of months really did us in.”

Business at the bar has languished since 2016, when the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency launched a $316.4 million project to improve Van Ness between Mission Street downtown and Lombard Street.

“We had a 30 percent drop in sales when this started and they put the fence up,” Waugh said. “When they started ripping up the sidewalk as part of the project, sales dropped by 50 percent.”

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Waugh’s predicament is similar to that of Brainwash Cafe, the 30-year-old business on Folsom Street that closed in 2017 after failing to outlast a nearby construction project. Business at Brainwash dropped significantly when a makeshift walkway was built in front of the cafe to get people safely from one end of the block to the other. The space remains empty.

“I remember reading what happened to Brainwash,” Waugh said. “And just getting a chill down my back. ... I knew it was going to happen here. And then it did.”

Waugh said that while her business was never the most trendy in the city, she at least felt, before the construction, that she would be able to finish out her five-year lease. Now, Waugh said, she and her co-owner will have to “make some difficult financial decisions” with a business difficult to sell because of the construction.

The Van Ness project is currently a year and a half behind schedule, due in part to problems such as work crews striking a pipe last month beneath a swath of Van Ness and Filbert Street, causing water to flood into the street.